By Deepa Majumdar
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) is an exception to the cosmic law that stipulates this dictum to fulfill the requirements of cosmic justice … if you live by the sword, you die by the sword. A prince of peace and an apostle of non-violence, Gandhi nevertheless died violently – in the hands of his assailant, Nathuram Godse (1910-1949). Moreover, this was the last of multiple attempts on his life. Both Gandhi and Godse had read the great scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, but with dramatically opposite effects. Gandhi became a world inspiring moral hero and martyr, but Godse, an assassin. This proves the old wisdom that not even scriptures can make us who we are, but rather it is we who make ourselves. Gandhi’s purported last words, “Hey Ram,” bring to mind Sri Krishna’s teachings in the Bhagavad Gita (VIII) – “whatever a man remembers at the last, when he is leaving the body, will be realized by him in the hereafter; because that will be what his mind has most constantly dwelt on during this life.”
What Gandhi came to teach the world was not only the universal principle of non-violence, but more importantly, a new ennobling politics, so rare any more in the world – namely, a spiritualized politics with roots in the numinous sphere. Like religion, politics too comes in a spectrum. If the religious experience ranges from the most sublime mysticism down to the dregs of religious violence, with ideologically driven, legalistic religiosity in the middle, then politics too comes in at least three levels. At the highest we have a politics that considers enmity with forgiveness, draws inspiration from the numinous roots of religion, and serves as the karmic wellspring of both social and individual change. At this highest level politics serves as the moral ground that transforms the character of the political actor. At its lowest however, politics serves as a cover for wanton violence. At its middling level politics expresses the ideological legalism of political correctness.
What commentators often forget is the fact that Gandhi was not justan activist par excellence … nor just the patron saint of all activists, enacting as he did, the quintessence of moral rigor. He was also a meticulous thinker who towers over the intellectuals of these times, a wonderful writer courageous enough to be confessional, and an ecumenical-contemplative theologian and practitioner. His writings therefore serve as fertile ground for scholars who are open-minded enough to understand the measured outpourings of a great soul … expressions that cannot be pigeon-holed by our normal rules of taxonomy. To a Hindu fundamentalist, Gandhi was not Hindu enough, while to a Christian fundamentalist, Gandhi borrowed from Christianity. But the truth lies elsewhere … Gandhi was spiritual enough to be at once a great Hindu, a great Christian, and a great Muslim – for his religiosity was deeply contemplative and experiential … not book-learned, nor doctrinaire.Gandhi was profoundly inspired by Jesus’ non-violence, as would be any great soul.If anything, Gandhi’s ecumenism should mark him as among the greatest of Hindus ever, for he put into discursive practice the ecumenism inherent in enlightened Hinduism that Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886) proved through mystical practice – namely, the great teaching of the Rig Veda that God is one but the learned call him by many names. Above all, Gandhi is to be commended for his philosophical understanding of the Divine. For, he depicted God not in the rich plethora of divine forms afforded by Hinduism, nor in the formal language of Nirguna and Saguna Brahman, but in the philosophical language of the true contemplative. Unlike Plato who depicted the Good as the parent of Truth, Gandhi, like St. Augustine, understood God as Truth itself. Hence Gandhi’s sole weapon of Satyagraha or Truth-force becomes tantamount to God-force. Moreover, by equating Truth with God, Gandhi countered one of the main weapons of the post-colonial west … namely their correspondence notion of truth or exteriorized, scientific truth.
Gandhi is to be eulogized, not only for his demonstration that the principle of non-violence is the only efficacious weapon in the face of physical violence. Indeed this principle is all the more precious today as we witness on the one hand, the hi-tech barbarism of western nations and on the other, the crude, low-tech barbarism of Islamist extremists. Indeed, non-violence is utterly relevant in a world of guns where the act of shooting has become blasé enough that self-defense supersedes forgiveness, torture (for defense purposes) is justified, and cynical realists dismiss idealists as being out of touch with reality! But the luminous glow of Gandhian thought reaches far deeper … It reaches beyond this eternal principle of non-violence to the very source of religious disharmony in our contemporary world … namely religious egotism, which raises its ugly head whenever we replace the Divine with our particular religion, as the goal of our adoration. When we adore the religious identity instead of God who should be the ultimate goal of all religions and all worship, we spawn a subtle idolatry that escalates religious egotism. Gandhi’s profound blend of religion and politics, which stands as the total converse of identity politics, quells such religious egotism. Gandhi’s numinous politics heals all fractiousness caused by ignorance, leading humanity to aninsightful understanding of the value of religious ecumenism, thenature of religion, and its relationship with morality.
Since the recent tragic Charlie Hebdo Paris attacks in particular, one common form of post-colonial racism is to disparage the non-western religious experience as backward … because non-European cultures have not contained religion by enlightened secularism. They have not undergone the European experience of the Enlightenment. According to this worldview, which recognizes only one track of history (the European), non-western societies therefore hopelessly lag behind Europe in an historical sense … But civilizations like the Indian never experienced the same tensions between religion and philosophy as did Europe. Moreover, unlike the European, the Indian religious experiment was contemplative and ecumenical enough to spawn religious forms of non-theism and atheism. Finally, non-western civilizations which have been exposed to the European Enlightenment through colonialism and post-colonialism, shy away from the results of this history. For the European experience of a secular-intellectual Enlightenment has led to a most dangerous, unenlightened, belligerent, secular-sensate state of culture that destroys inner life on a daily basis, even as it engenders imperialism of the most sophisticated sort.
But Gandhi, through his numinous politics, gives the world an alternative that transcends our contemporary dialectic between cruel non-western religious theocracies on the one hand, and cold secular-scientific, warring-bombing western democracies, on the other. This alternative allows for human experience to reach that rarefied realm where politics and religion coalesce. It is one thing to make the cynical statement that Gandhian methods do not work. It is entirely different to make the righteously pragmatic statement that Gandhi’s methods, although the highest, are not always feasible. Nevertheless … whether feasible or not … the Gandhian paradigm of spiritualized politics, which we see also in HH the 14thDalai Lama, remains the only solution to a world fraught by violence in the name of God and Mammon.